Background and Relevant Art
Computers and computing systems have affected nearly every aspect of modern living. Computers are generally involved in work, recreation, healthcare, transportation, entertainment, household management, etc.
Further, computing system functionality can be enhanced by a computing system's ability to be interconnected to other computing systems via network connections. Network connections may include, but are not limited to, connections via wired or wireless Ethernet, cellular connections, or even computer to computer connections through serial, parallel, USB, or other connections. The connections allow a computing system to access services at other computing systems and to quickly and efficiently receive application data from other computing system.
Interconnection of computing systems has facilitated distributed computing systems, such as so-called “cloud” computing systems. In this description, “cloud computing” may be systems or resources for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services, etc.) that can be provisioned and released with reduced management effort or service provider interaction. A cloud model can be composed of various characteristics (e.g., on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, etc.), service models (e.g., Software as a Service (“SaaS”), Platform as a Service (“PaaS”), Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”), and deployment models (e.g., private cloud, community cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, etc.).
Cloud and remote based service applications are prevalent. Such applications are hosted on public and private remote systems such as clouds and usually offer a set of web based services for communicating back and forth with clients.
In distributed computing environments, long running applications may be implemented. Example long running applications are applications such as batch processing jobs or applications that are interacting with multiple services. Those services themselves have chunks of work items. Such work items may include, for example, provisioning a virtual machine in a cloud environment or setting up a database, etc. In particular, an orchestrator may control the overall flow of a long running application and may assign different worker tasks to perform substantive activities associated with the orchestrator instance. In present implementations, long running applications are quite non-trivial to implement. Developers typically write a lot of plumbing code for the simplest of these long running apps. Thus, rather than just being able to focus on coding application functionality, the developer also spends considerable time determining how entities for running the long running application interact with each other.
The subject matter claimed herein is not limited to embodiments that solve any disadvantages or that operate only in environments such as those described above. Rather, this background is only provided to illustrate one exemplary technology area where some embodiments described herein may be practiced.